The Joker and The Dogs
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image: a black and white dog on a red background with black puffs
Personally, I keep both in the deck. I need as much information as I can. Even more than I can handle sometimes.
It's easier to settle into knowledge over time than to let the mystery catch you.
The Joker is a trickster, neither good nor evil. The Joker is the chaotic beauty and terror of living on earth. Of living on earth in a body.
Of living in a body that dies. Of living in a body that dies more often and worse because it is Black.
If there wasn't a Joker, we would have to invent it. Which, if you are living in America, we did.
The Joker isn’t welcome in every game. It's a space of possibility and intention and mis/fortune.
Game of Tricks
Euchre, the game for which the Joker was invented, has an origin story as murky as the Joker's. Some credit its origin to France, others to Germany. Little proof is available.
Card reading has a way of obscuring its origins. The tales are full of apocrypha. There's no way to decipher which thread is longest.
You will believe as you believe.
What we know is that the Joker came to be during the American Civil War. What we know is that Euchre is literally a game of tricks.
In a trick-taking game, each player lays down a card on a set timeline. All cannot win in a single trick. One will, some won't.
This is the very nature of the Joker.
On his 1863 Joker, Samuel Hart, a playing card manufacturer in Philadelphia, put a dog on his.
It was not the first Joker, but it also certainly was the first Joker.
Prior to Hart’s invention, the Joker was a blank card. Hart illustrated his.
1863 is the turning point of the Civil War. It is the year where emancipation became a central goal for Union forces. Prior to that, the hope had been to restore the country to a single unit.
Euchre was popular among Confederate soldiers. One is quoted to have said this: “when hymns wafting through camp forced the men to realize it was Sunday, ‘We would lay down our cards, even in a game of euchre.’”
Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862. It went into effect on January 1, 1863.
January 1 to enslaved Black people was Heartbreak Day. Our slavers called it Hiring Day.
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Watchnight
Watchnight was for praying that you would not be kidnapped once more. That prayer was often a tarrying prayer, it did not cease.
Watchnight, December 31st was for loving on your people one last time before they were possibly rented to someone else. Or sold.
Watchnight, December 31st, is the only birthdate in cardology associated with the Joker.
Yet even in this hiring, there was rebellion. There was flight. There was insurrection.
Survival required many to be more than one thing at once, to embody the Joker. Enslaved kitchen workers acted as spies for the cause of freedom.
Blacksmiths, shoemakers, and other enslaved people who moved around as part of their work spread the word. They shared information in secret meetings.
They left to tend to their metal, their nails, their labor.
The Dogs
But there were also dogs.
Dogs followed our ancestors as they took flight, leaving their rows for the crows. Dogs tracking them to a river, but no further.
Dogs on the Best Bower card, the Jolly Joker. The dogs of whiteness and slave society.
This is one of the ways the Joker comes to be erroneously equated to tarot's' Fool. The presence of the dog. It is not tarot's Fool.
The Fool is an everyman. The Fool is sometimes a dupe, sometimes a king; here a loser, there a winner.
George Washington wrote in a letter to an estate manager "It is not for any good purpose Negros raise, or keep dogs; but to aid them in their night robberies; for it is astonish to see the command under which their dogs are.”
If an enslaved Black person was found to have a dog, they were to be "severely punished." The dog, hanged.
Dogs were trained into our enemies. Our enemies, however conditionally, they remain. Whether police dog, drug sniffing dog, or the dog of a racist neighbor, we all know they're dual.
The hunting dogs that pursued our ancestor's footsteps sometimes caught and sometimes lost.
Dogs retain in them something of the wolf. Dogs may see the dead as they pass. Their howling announces the departure of spirit, or their arrival.
The Joker is the essence of that for which we cannot plan. The Joker defies explanation and logic.
The Gentleman, Then as Now
Some say red Joker, black Joker. I say big Joker, little Joker.
As the decks change, so too change the colors. The big Joker is bigger.
The big Joker holds the print, the stamp of the maker. The little Joker may be scattered, and is often printed smaller on the card.
The big Joker holds the stamp of the maker. The big Joker tests what the universe will allow.
It tells us a coming is coming, though we do not know what until it has come.
The Joker may be the winner or the wild card. It depends on the game. It retains this meaning in fortune telling and divination.
Like a jester, speaking truth to the powerful and powerless in a single speech, the Joker sits in between.
While a Joker, fool or jester, is in relationship to the royal court, they are apart. While the Joker is not royalty, they are lifted up from the earth. They are a drawing towards.
Whether disaster or wholeness or both, they are a drawing onto that no one dare resist.
European playing cards have a longstanding association with the Roman god Mercury.
It is Mercury's accouterments that form the four suits in tarot and playing cards. They are the four ways Mercury spoke to humans.
Those four ways are "the Caduceus, stylus, or magic wand; the Coin or ring, emblem of eternity; the Sword, and the Cup."
This information comes from Prophetical, educational, and playing cards (1912) by Mrs. John King van Rensselaer.
She also writes "the Joker combines...the versatile qualities attributed to...Hermes." And "the Joker takes every card in the pack."
When we talk about the Joker, we are speaking of what is outside of the royal court.
When we talk about the Joker, we are speaking of what is outside of those subjugated by them.
To speak of the Joker is to speak of God. To speak of the Joker is to speak of the adversary.
Most of all, to speak of the Joker is to speak of the Man at the Crossroads. The Joker changes our fortunes in way only they can forsee.
They are the embodiment of “expect the unexpected.”
Deus Ex Machina
We understand that card divination is a technology. The Joker is deus ex machina. So too, are our intuitions applied to a deck of playing cards.
Through fortune telling with cards, we can see what's hidden from us. We cannot, however, see everything.
The presence of Joker reminds us of the presence of god, of fate, of mystery.
Even as we work and wait, we pray for the answers. We watch for the signs that freedom is coming.
We do so without ceasing. May we evade the dogs.
May the dogs always lose, though we know sometimes the dogs will win.
May we win our trick.
